This is truly a really feely book. The full spread of every page incorporates touch-and-feel elements on almost every inch of the page—if it’s only raised markings to imitate the direction of an animal’s fur or feathers. Besides these raised markings, there are more standard touch-and-feel elements too: a cow’s short, coarse hair, a duckling’s feathered belly, a piglet’s squishy snout. Each illustration features two images of the animal, which is nice because it offers the child two perspectives, the creature’s name, and the animal’s tracks, as well as a few environmental elements. Each page of text asks two things of the child, either directing them to both touch-and-feel elements or asking them to find, for example, the cow’s “big, shiny nose.” This is a really well-imagined, very interactive board book primer.

Using anthropomorphic mice as protagonists, this board book reinforces a parent’s perpetual love for her child. The illustrations are generally nostalgically vintage and cutesy, but there was something about smiling sun that I found more disturbing than cute. I think the vintage quality of the illustrations will help this one get a little traction in this difficult genre.

The illustrations of the bunny protagonists are cute with soft pastels and bunnies that are sometimes more bunny than anthropomorphic with long fur that lends movement to the protagonist’s forms. As the story takes the bunnies through a day of play outdoors, each page spread ends with “Somebunny loves you!” The text does make one mention of “find[ing] God’s joy,” but is otherwise secular. I have did not pull the tab on the book to find out what tune the book plays. It’s becoming very difficult for books on this theme–the eternal and unfailing love of a parent for a child–to stand out for me. Not as many of these exist that are explicitly religious, but that is the what I remember most about this book for that being the most original thing about it. Perhaps the music would have stood out more?

The movable pieces—all animated by pulling various tabs—were definitely the greatest part of this book, and the best of those was by far the clackety tapping toes of the tap dancing pig. A newborn chick somehow stumbles to the entrance of an animals’ dance hall and is greeted by a rhino—one of the band?—who invites him inside. The animals each show him a different dance and the chick incorporates all of them into his own routine on the final pages. There’s the Gator Mashed Potater and the Hippopota Hula. There’s a definite stereotyped jazz tone to the language, with phrases like “Crazy, Chickie Baby.” There’s a rhythmic pattern to the language too—“boom baba BOOM”—you can hear the beat, and it’s so easy to make the characters dance to that beat, hard to avoid pulling the tab in rhythm with the words. I read this story aloud while standing, hoping to get the kids and parents to dance with me. I got a little participation, interestingly mostly with the Gator Mashed Potater.

Egg was a pretty cute story, but it was a poor choice to read aloud. How does one read aloud a story that uses so few words and that relies so heavily on page spreads with no text at all? What text there is serves almost more as a part of the illustration than as text for reading. The repetition of words and the absence of repetition serve to say more than do the actual words. There are four eggs. Three hatch into birds (“Crack. Crack. Crack. Egg. Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! Egg.”). The last does not hatch. (“Waiting. Waiting” ad nauseam.) The birds return and peck at the remaining egg to help stimulate its hatching, but the “surprise!” is a bit more than they were expecting. It becomes a story about accepting those who seem different at first glance and perhaps at beginning to accept and expect the unexpected. (Did that bird hatch from the sun?) There may be more of a message that could be read into it, more of a metaphor in the different-ness of the crocodile/alligator (I’m not cool enough to remember how to tell the two apart, and I doubt he drew for scientific accuracy). Could this perhaps be a beginning reader book? I feel like this book presents opportunities for learning, maybe for therapy, helping kids understand their feelings as much as recognize the sounds that letters form, though I cannot vouch for either.

This is an almost wordless picture book. It’s only words I think are “nope,” “yep,” and some onomatopoeias: “boop” and “flap.” A baby bird is reluctant to leave the nest on his first flight. He imagines terrible things waiting on the forest floor—cats, wolves, gators—all creatively illustrated as his imagination through a thought bubble and lighter coloration from the rest of the page but otherwise seamless with the “real” forest floor. It occurred to me that this could be another fun alternative graduation gift, if a little more tongue-in-cheek than other graduation gift books.

A little, brown-haired boy who loves unicorns—his shirt proclaims it so—uses a magic fountain and coin to wish for a unicorn—and it works! It’s “awesome” at first. The unicorn flies, and there are rainbows, but the unicorn ultimately proves to be a troublesome pet or houseguest. He sheds glitter—and we all know how impossible it is to get rid of glitter. He scratches up the couch. Worst of all, unicorns get lonely, and they can magically summon friends, and soon you’re hosting a party, and the house is completely destroyed. Luckily, unicorns can be wished away as easily as they can be wished for. The open ending leaves plenty of room for a sequel or a reader’s imagination to expand into another story. The text is told as if advising the character. It’s playful and imaginative—its imagination and playfulness only heightened by the illustrations, which really add the details to the unicorn’s destructiveness. Did I mention how awesome it is that the human protagonist of this story is a dark-haired boy?

This book takes the world through the end of winter into the wonder of spring and to the longing for summer, drawing on the melting of the snow and the reawakening of the plants, the blossoming flowers, the hatching of the birds, the “more rain and more rain.” There’s much about the necessity of waiting. Alliteration and repetition lend a poetic quality to a text that relies pretty heavily on simple words and simple sentence structures. Distinct reference is made to the senses, which was a good opportunity to include my audience in the storytelling (What does spring smell like? What does it hear like?). None of the human characters are recognizably people of color, but many are noticeably white.

I’m sort of on the fence about this book, written in the style made popular by Hervé Tullet. The book reads a bit like an interactive app, really, like a tamigochi, a game to grow and keep alive a plant by following the instructions and going through the steps and providing for the plant what it needs to be healthy and strong, Farmville on a single-plant scale. On the one hand, it’s not an app, so it gets the kids away from a screen, even if they are still interacting with the book as if it were a screen. On the other, it would make a cooler app because the illustrations could be animated to respond to the reader’s interaction with the page/screen. The pages are bright and colorful, and it’s a fun way to explain the various things that a plant needs to grow, but there’s really no plot other than the plant growing because it is getting x, y, and z from its environment because of the reader’s interaction with the page.

Having recently read Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site and Mighty, Mighty Construction Site, it made sense to finish up this pair’s repertoire and read this book. This book has a team of animal railway workers packing up a steam train for an overnight journey. This explains the different types of train cars and parts—again, a primer for me. Each type of car is bolded, so it’s obvious that the pair’s intention was to make a primer. Several of the pages make a point of mentioning how many of an object there are—giving this a chance to be a numbers primer too, though there does not seem to be an order to the numbers. I didn’t see as much of a lesson or as much of a story in this book of theirs than the others. Like the others, the text rhymes. There are a lot of onomatopoeias. I did like the end where the unlikely crew makes more realistic sense when revealed to be a child’s toy, and the story presumably a work of his imagination or dream.

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These reviews are not endorsed by any of the authors or publishers or anyone else involved in the making of these books. They are independent, honest reviews by a reader.

This is a book that I first spotted in a clearance bin at Barnes & Noble. That store sold out of its copies of the book before I brought one up to a register. When on vacation I discovered it accidentally in the bargain section of another Barnes & Noble, I snatched a copy and brought it to the register right away, even though it wasn’t clearance priced. I admit that I judged its worth almost solely on its cover when considering its purchase. Cee Biscoe’s illustrations are whimsically adorable. I’m intrigued by what the illustrations here do for the story. Biscoe’s illustrations evoke a more modern setting than I would have, I think, otherwise pictured for this text, and I like that. It introduces the idea of dragons still existing the wilds of the world. The more modern setting paired with the family’s desperate need for firewood that must be collected by young boys in a snowstorm suggests to me too a family of a lower socioeconomic bracket, though for that, they do not seem to be terribly ill off given the several books that the family reads throughout the story or the toast rack that seems such a frivolity to me in any socioeconomic bracket, though they seem to live without electricity, possess only a few clothes, and wash in a metal tub. The text by Smallman is delightful enough too with some wonderful similes that offer a sense of place and character to the text and many an onomatopoeia. His text tells of a young dragon scared of the water, who learns that the water is not only innocuous but that by bathing he is made more lovable to the family that adopts him and cannot stand the touch of his unwashed and too hot flesh. There may be a lesson there for the child unwilling to take a bath or afraid to learn to swim. More likely, though, the child will relate better to Ryan, the young boy who finds the dragon’s egg and brings it home. The dragon, Crumpet, is not particularly anthropomorphized, being given more the qualities of a dog than a human. Ryan’s is a story of wanting to keep a troublesome pet and discovering some way to make that pet more palatable to his family. That may be a relatable tale too, though one that I personally and thankfully have not experienced.

This is the latest of the Pigeon books by Mo Willems. I had the chance to read this and several of the other Pigeon books that I’ve already reviewed here to a group of children for a story hour. Willems books are wonderful to read aloud, the dialogue that composes the stories being wonderfully expressive and between it and the illustrations the tone and inflections that Willems desires being wonderfully clear. Being unable yet to give distinct voices to each character, I find myself still adding the occasional dialogue tag or description of the characters’ actions that doesn’t appear in the text. Willems’ books are interesting in that, through those additions, the books could easily be tailored to the audience and situation. I love Willems books for the accuracy of his characters’ voices, mimicking lines and tones that I’ve heard from children on many occasions before. The Pigeon Needs a Bath! is not excluded from this praise. Pigeon doesn’t wasn’t to bathe. He doesn’t believe that he needs to. In talking with a parent after the story hour, we discussed the intended age for the books, which does tend towards the elder level of picture book readers. These books are marketed for ages 3-5 (I would actually argue that this like Elephant and Piggie ought to be marketed for ages 4-8) and appeal strongly to the parents. The Pigeon and Willems don’t apologize for an occasional large and nuanced word. I cannot remember what word was the trigger for that particular comment. It might have been “considered;” it might have been “coincidental;” then there are phrases like “That is a matter of opinion.”